Pat Howard: Browns have football world, fans abuzz

Thursday

The Steelers are getting next to nothing for two of the best players in the game.

Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, wide receiver Antonio Brown and running back Le'Veon Bell have been the Pittsburgh Steelers' "killer B's," as fearsome an offensive trio as any in football.

But then there was one.

Granted, the lone killer B remaining in Pittsburgh, Roethlisberger, is the biggest and buzziest. Any Cleveland Browns fan will tell you that from weary experience. And it's not as if the Steelers don't have credible successors to the other two.

Wideout JuJu Smith-Schuster has stepped out of Brown's shadow and was voted as the team's most valuable player last season. And it's a bonus in these parts that the next man up when Bell sat down was Erie native James Conner.

Heck, even many of us Browns fans in Erie root for Conner. Within reason.

Still, the Steelers are getting next to nothing for two of the best players in the game. Bell held out the entire season, leaving $14 million-plus on the table on his way to taking a pay cut with the New York Jets. Brown behaved so badly that the exasperated Steelers brass traded him for peanuts even though he was under contract for three more years.

And as Cleveland.com's Mary Kay Cabot pointed out, the Steelers lost two of their killer B's just as division rival Cleveland appears to have found one of its own. That would be Mayfield, Baker Mayfield.

Then the Browns traded for another. That would Odell Beckham Jr., an elite wide receiver late of the New York Giants. I'll bet you Mayfield's in a good mood these days.

The combination of the buzz building around the Browns and the braying from Pittsburgh about dysfunction and division in the Steelers' locker room is a bit disorienting. It's the new abnormal.

I've long been used to condescension and, worse, pity from the Steelers fans who dominate our newsroom and my circle of friends. Browns-Steelers didn't even really qualify as a rivalry anymore, given that Pittsburgh owned the series since 1999 to the tune of 34-6-1.

Then a couple of the Steelers' biggest stars started flaking out while a new front office in Cleveland promised to "get real players" and then went out and did it. Talk about a disturbance in the force.

Don't get me wrong. The Steelers' organizational heartburn and finger-pointing don't portend anything like the endless trough of despair in Cleveland. The franchise still has sharp ownership and a winning culture that's likely to hold up to the drama brought on by a couple of egomaniacs. The Steelers will be fine — as long as Roethlisberger holds up, at least.

But I do admit to savoring — a bit more than was seemly — the complaints and hand-wringing of two colleagues about Brown sticking their team with the booby prize and in the process raking in a windfall from the Oakland Raiders. How could they let that happen? they lamented. How?

That's when I floated my hypothesis. Perhaps the Cleveland curse was bored and looking for a new challenge and was giving Pittsburgh a tryout.

That brought smiles to their faces, and I was glad to provide some comic relief in a dark moment. I'm glad also that they'll have to look over their shoulders more than they have in a long time.

Actually, the Steelers' enduring success has created a sense of entitlement and outsized expectations among a good many of their fans. Any bump in the road prompts them to melt down on social media and other places where people rant these days.

One of my hobbies when things get a bit squirrelly in Pittsburgh is to visit my newsroom colleague Kevin Flowers' Facebook feed. Kevin is a Steelers diehard and also an aficionado of the game and business of football. He spends quite a bit of energy talking fellow Pittsburgh fans off the ledge.

Kevin will counsel them not to lose their minds, reminding them that the Steelers built long-lasting success by rocking steady and trusting the Pittsburgh way. Simmer down, people.

We Cleveland fans, however, can be excused for struggling to stop from vibrating out of our chairs. Football is fickle, but right now this is a lot of fun.

In Pittsburgh, fans and the media are coming to terms with their losses and trying to handicap what's next. In New York, the general reaction seems to be "we wuz robbed" or some variation.

In Cleveland, news reports said, a Shaker Heights woman frantically called 911 about a boy running up and down their street screaming and flailing his arms. It turns out he'd just heard about the Browns' trade for Beckham.

I'm too old for that sort of thing. But you let it rip, kid.

Pat Howard can be reached at 870-1721. Send email to pat.howard@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ETNhoward.

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